


my new marching orders

by theformerone



Series: before you 'verse [2]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Gen, Timeline What Timeline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-26
Updated: 2019-10-26
Packaged: 2020-12-28 16:04:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21139385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theformerone/pseuds/theformerone
Summary: Sakura's team seems to be made up of herself, two perfectly reasonable young shinobi, and God's favorite little shithead.





	my new marching orders

**Author's Note:**

> og timeline is severely and thoroughly cronched so that danzo and hiruzen's entire generation is just old enough to start training precisely when i needed them to lol 
> 
> danzo's new backstory is lifted from my own hc's, which is also explored in my fic outlier!

She's got a stellar left hook aimed for Kagami's jaw when suddenly, the air around him tastes faintly of lightning, and Danzō is there, lifting his palm to take the force of the hit. Her eyes narrow meanly, and instead of letting him hold her fist and deflect the strength of her chakra coating it, Sakura doubles down. 

Sakura's control is much finer than Danzō's. Of the boys, he's the closest to matching her, but Sakura's league is two liftetime's out of this smug seventeen year old asshole's. She lets a fine blue whorl of her chakra flicker through the blow to show her displeasure. The mist is much denser than the one coming off of Danzō's open palm; her chakra vibrated at a much higher frequency than his, a physical demarcation of the space between them. 

Sakura only reminded him of that when she was very unhappy with him. 

"I'm going to break your hand," she says, lifting an eyebrow, "because that's how my shishou taught me to respect the rules that medical shinobi have sworn themselves to follow."

The smug look on Danzō's face abruptly falls. He had managed to substitute himself for Kagami in time to take the blow, but he had only been able to muster enough chakra to disable her blow _after_ he had switched them. The split-second where his chakra had to redirect itself would have been plenty for Sakura to up the ante on her own stream of releasing chakra. If she had been fighting to kill, she would have won. 

Danzō knows this because he's a war baby. He, Kagami, and Torifu all are. They were all fourteen when the war ended, so too young for the official academy age, but also too old and too good to be made to wait an extra year. 

Like other shinobi children too young for the academy but with too much valuable experience (read: some kind of post-traumatic anxiety that made being off the roster physically impossible; Ino had nearly written a paper on it with Kakashi as the focus) to be left off duty. 

Decent long-lasting plans for ANBU were still being drafted (including Tobirama taking extensive visits to Uzushio that Madara --who insisted that only Uzushio spices could sate an Uchiha with the, drunk-quote 'appetite of a dragon'-- was usually eager to tag along on), and teams in other divisions by now were named by their function or by symbol for necessity. 

Numbers had been saved for the academy teams. 

Mitokado, Koharu, and Hiruzen made up Team One. Sakura and her band of brats were Team Two. Sakura would be part of the committee that would help Hashirama discern what team combinations would be fruitful for permanent assignments. 

Building and tweaking the institutions she had interacted with when she was young the first time always gave Sakura a sense of deja vu. 

She had taken one look at the files and knew the boys had to be hers. Akimichi Torifu; one of the physically strongest of the Akimichi in his year, who also had a stunning sensitivity to senjutsu chakra. His eventual butterfly contract with his clan would help him sort that out, but Torifu had one of the keenest senses for disease Sakura had ever come across. She could take him for a walk in the newly opened pediatrics wing, and Torifu could tell her who's issues were rooted in chakra and whose were rooted in physiology.

Then there was Uchiha Kagami, who had been Sasuke's personal recommendation. He was a sweet tempered boy, orphaned by the war and so raised communally by the clan and by the temple. Kagami's gentle heart and deep devotion to his clan and his new village gave him a certain kind of calm that was difficult to gain at his age.

Sakura had already allocated part of his training to weekly shōgi games the Nara played in the public park they had constructed at the edge of their land. Kagami had been born with the mind of a medic, of a trauma surgeon, but she was going to hone it into the mind of a strategist, too.

And then there was Danzō. His parents had died in the early days of the war in the crossfire, and per his clan's private traditions Danzō had been too young to inherit the title of clan head. Shimura Isshin, Danzō's uncle, had led the clan in his stead and into Konoha. 

Danzō had a little sister called Keiko, and a brother called Goro. At twenty, he'd be old enough to be the official head of his clan. Right now, he was a fourteen year old scion of the Shimura clan, devastating with a sword, with the _best _chakra control of his entire clan. Tobirama had all but flung his file at her, giving her dibs immediately. 

"I want him, but if you build him up, I'm grabbing him for an apprenticeship," he had grumbled, lifting Koharu's folder as well. "And you can have Koharu when she's older."

Sakura had nodded her head, and took the file from his hand to acknowledge the deal. 

"You know it's vital to me to support women."

Tobirama nodded himself, scribbling a note in Danzō's file as he did. Koharu would be a perfect little mad genius by the time Tobirama was done with her. She had a keen mind, probably the cleverest of the clanless kunoichi that were the children of nomads or mercenaries. In a different lifetime, she'd make a perfect spy. 

In this one, she'd make a damn fine assistant. A damn fine apprentice. And that is something that makes Sakura's heart soften up. She wonders if this is how Tsunade felt about her, this affection. Tsunade wouldn't have helped Sakura become the woman she is if Kakashi hadn't been there first. He had left his bad lessons and his good ones. But nothing replaced your genin sensei. 

Even less could replace your shishou. Sakura knew firsthand.

"Yes, I do," Tobirama said, smirking up at her from behind his reading glasses. 

Right now, Sakura would return him if she could. Knowing that Koharu is probably being the same kind of awful to Tobirama is a small mercy. Guiding children is such (rewarding) bullshit. 

"Torifu-kun!" she bellows. "What is the first clause of the four rules that govern medical shinobi?"

Torifu dispels the genjutsu he was using to disguise himself, and Sakura lifts an eyebrow in appraisal. 

"Very fine work," she says, inclining her head. "You've been keeping up with the Uchiha?"

Torifu smiles brightly, but he keeps his bo staff light in his hands should she shift her ire to him. It's been known to happen; Sakura isn't the type to lose her temper, she's too old for that kind of shit. Two lifetimes in, and she feels like she's about fifty even though she's probably only a few months shy of twenty-three. But when all three of the boys fucked up on the same day, she wasn't liable if she left them to heal their more superficial training wounds themselves. 

"Yes, Tsubaki-sensei," Torifu nods, "I have a mentor called Takara-san. She doesn't have a Sharingan, but she teaches genjutsu to her cousins that do have it!"

"Takara-chan," Sakura hums, applying more pressure to her thumb and snapping Danzō's in half in the process. He grunts. "She's also one of the academy teachers for second and third years."

Of course Sakura knew that Takara had picked up Torifu as part of her little brood. The only thing she loved better than feeding the neighborhood strays was teaching the fundamentals of advanced illusionry. 

"I'm glad to hear it," she says. "The first clause, Torifu-kun?"

"_No medic ninja shall ever stop medical treatment until the lives of their party members have come to an end!" _

By far he's the sweetest of them; he even clicks his heels and does a salute as he says it. That's the shinobi breeding alright. When the boys had first met her, the lot of them refused to call her anything other than 'Uchiha-sensei' out of respect for her work in the hospital. 

Before it had even opened, Sakura had been up to her elbows in sick children, malnourished elders, and infected puncture wounds. The First War had somehow managed to miraculously, produce almost zero medical advances because there wasn't enough peacetime to perhaps, start a medical library and then maybe, eventually a hospital, because for some reason, two ridiculous men decided their families needed to fight each other _forever. _

Tobirama will probably have an aneurysm if Sakura is ever allowed to teach anything other than medicine. 

The long and short of it was, she had healed someone that each of them knew. Also, Sakura was legally an Uchiha. She may have made her exits at night to the Uzushio quarter (sometimes high-fiving Izuna right before they both disappeared to the beds they'd rather share), but she spent plenty of daylight time on the compound, and in the temple, because she loved giving Sasuke shit for turning himself into a blind pacifist priest named after his own brother. 

"When they make therapy here," she says to him, the night they first have a proper drink once the war is over and the village is ready for winter, "you are first in line, motherfucker."

Sasuke can't hold his liquor, so he snorts into his sake, then gets some in his eyes, then cries laughing until he's fine again. 

That had probably been one of the best nights of her life. 

"Kagami-kun!" 

He appears in a shushin whose speed will only be rivaled by his great-grandson's, holding his side with a shaky Mystic Palm, mending the rib Sakura cracked with her last kick before she aimed the punch that Danzō thought his name was written on. 

"Second clause."

He stands up straight as he can without hurting himself, out of deference to her not only as his sensei, but also as the wife of Uchiha Izuna, and the woman who's single act of mercy on a battleground ended generations of fighting. 

"_No medic ninja shall ever stand on the front lines._"

"The third law," Sakura says, repeating the words she had said to them on their first day. 

Sakura can remember it now. She had brought them on a steep, chakra-less hike up the Founders Monument. Madara's face was complete, and Hashirama's head next to it had already taken shape. They were working on Mito's right beside it now that the spring thaw had just begun, but it was still quite cold outside. Izuna's would hopefully be started before the hottest part of the summer began. 

Picking the placement had been the exact kind of stupid, petty nonsense that the elders latched onto and gnawed on for days. There was also a beautiful stone tablet with the names of all of the clan and family heads that had pledged to join the experiment of Konoha, and there was a collective note of thanks to the nomads and merchants and families that had come to the village for safety. 

Sakura thought that Hashirama and Madara's heads made sense together; they were the friends and architects that had gotten farthest with peace. Which was to say, nowhere, until Sakura (and Sasuke) had to travel back through time to fix things.

Mito's and Izuna's heads worked because, well, the Uchiha _really _got on with Uzumaki and Uzushio shinobi, almost as a rule. Before their seclusion into the compound, (which was _not _happening this go around) the Uchiha were quite social once they were comfortable in their environments. And Uzushio shinobi as a rule, loved making people feel at home. 

Sakura got the chance to see Marishi come and visit when Mito's pregnancy was first announced. She had been about four months along, and by then, they were sure that the pregnancy would stick. Marishi came with a portion of Ashina's guard (including Tomoyo, who was delighted to fuck with her new in-laws) to offer her prayers for the baby at the shrine in the Uzushio district, and to bring fresh saltwater from the Yorokobi Sea for worship for the pious. 

Marishi had (in a way that she must have taught Mito) invited herself and her small entourage into the private homes of nearly every clan head in Konoha. Everyone at least had tea with her, and then they loved her, so they had her stay until dinner. 

When she visited the Uchiha, Sakura had been very pleased to sneak Mito into the mainhouse on the compound to see her mother roaring drunk with the Uchiha elders. 

The boys had all been there early, to the Monument, that is. By the time Sakura had gotten to the base of the mountain, they were all already getting more acquainted with each other. Sakura had showed up precisely on time but she was sure that their conversation sounded easy and comfortable. 

That was lovely to hear and to see. That what she and Sasuke had sewn into the fabric of the village was already showing its colors on the other side of the war. 

They had shot to their feet and saluted her with all the enthusiasm they could muster for fourteen year olds (who absolutely had some kind of PTSD) awake at the crack of dawn. 

She had written it on a pad of paper in her pack; no Uzushio shinobi left home without some in the morning. She had written carefully in the new dialect that Tobirama and the rest of the language minded shinobi (honestly, it was extraordinary in how many different directions his mind moved) had cobbled together from the various non-standardized alphabets that people had brought with them into the village. 

Sakura wrote in a slightly different, more modern style, but she had trained herself along with the rest of the grown shinobi who didn't have the luxury of being in the academy while learning it. 

"_No medic ninja shall ever die until they are the last of their platoon._"

She had, had Danzō read it back to her after she had said it. Then had the three of them say it once more. She had done so with all of the rules. 

The boys had all noted their interest in being īryo-nin. That and the various personal capabilities that made all of them excellent candidates had sealed the deal.

Sakura wasn't the type to churn out team after team. She was like Tsunade, and Kakashi before her; discerning as fuck. And (more like Tsunade than Kakashi), she was loyal. She was making these boys her students, but she already had lifelong career paths for each of them. 

Torifu would be a sage by thirty if Sakura had her way, then a teacher after that. And Kagami would be an excellent surgeon, but Sakura thought he would be best with the kids because of his temperament. Sakura would saddle him there until he hit seventy-two and was old enough to be an Uchiha elder. 

Danzō? With his ridiculous insistence on protecting his comrades even at his own expense? 

Sakura had noticed it with the first bell test she had administered to them. Having already decided she'd make them repeat the test until they passed it, she was stunningly surprised when, during their first test, Danzō --unprompted-- managed to get Sakura in a headlock that only made her flash back to her war when she had less hair and Kankurō was running towards her, his puppets the corpses of their fallen comrades, and this Zetsu was really choking her out and --

On the bright side, Sakura had come back to her self and managed not to kill her student the literal first day she met him. 

But as he had grabbed her, he had managed to get a kunai into his grip, and cut the bells loose from Sakura's belt. He dragged her back while she was still limp and lucid in the startling color of her memory, had shouted for the other two to get the bells. 

It would have worked. But Sakura was twice the war baby these three were. She broke his hold by getting her feet under her, and standing up until there was no ground beneath him. That helped with getting the wind back in her. 

In that moment, and in this one, Sakura sees Danzō for exactly what he is; a kid that wants to be recognized as someone good. All kids want that. All people want it, really. A fundamental part of how we view ourselves, is how we're viewed by others. Being a good neighbor, or a bad son, or the town gossip, or the levelheaded neighbor with the bright sunflowers in their window. 

Danzō has probably wanted to be a good shinobi ever since his parents died. It's probably what he wanted before that, because there was little else for kids to want when he was born. But no clan heir that lost their parents wanted anything more than to in some way, prove themselves to their parents ghosts, and to the remaining members of the clan. 

Danzō wants to be _good. _He wants to help people. He wants to uphold his family's name, their reputation for their excellent judgement and fearsome swordsmanship. He's fourteen and his parents are dead and the war is over, and the world is suddenly larger than it's ever been, and he wants to fill it with good because all he knew before that was awful. 

Yes, sometimes he's brash; he picks fights with Kagami because Fire Country shinobi flirt like children, and he talks back to Sakura during training whenever the fickle health of his little sister is in worse straits, but above it all, the only thing that Danzō really wants for himself is to be a good shinobi, and a good man. 

Sakura never would have said it in the life before, but when he was young, Danzō would have made a fine Hokage. Sakura thinks so now, too. But he's got a long way to go before he gets there. And showing off to his teammates by taking hits for them will only get him hurt in the long run. He's not Naruto by any means. He's not rivals with Kagami or with Torifu, he follows orders well, and doesn't have some kind of attention disorder making it difficult for him to learn in a classroom setting. 

But he is a kid with a good heart, and that's something that Naruto would take a chance on. He had with every pubescent kid they had ever met on his travels. He inspired them. He gave them chances when other people wrote them off as unkind or callous; Naruto understood that they were just hurt.

Sakura wants to train the Sandaime, if she can. Sasuke thinks it's a ridiculous idea, but this Danzō is young, and his hair flops into his eyes when he's excited, and maybe if the Second War doesn't happen and Sakura can stay his teacher until he's a man, there might be a chance. 

Hiruzen was always too soft for the position. Let too much slide. Danzō was decisive if he was anything. And that iron resolve would have been put to better use if his own bitterness hadn't soured him into a tyrant. 

Sakura is going to keep this boy sweet. But she is not going to let him stay stupid. 

"Danzō-kun," she says, and he immediately stops the flow of chakra through his body and to his hand, and allows her to force him down to both knees. It's better that way; Sakura shaves back her own strength until she's only holding his fist by her own raw power. "What is the fourth clause?"

He swallows, face going a little sweaty with the damage she's inflicted on his fist, but he still speaks. 

"_Only those medic ninja who have mastered the Strength of a Hundred Technique of the ninja art Creation Rebirth are allowed to discard the above-mentioned laws." _

Verbatim, all of them. It made her proud to be a teacher. 

"Do you have one of these?" she asks, pointing a finger at her forehead. 

There's a second diamond just under the first now; she had started storing chakra away in case the other newly blossoming hidden villages were starting to coalesce. Sakura knew her history, and she knew that some idiot or another was bound to stumble on one of the bijuu. Not everyone had a Kurama in their head to let them know to treat the chakra beasts like people. 

Sakura was probably going to need the extra seal's worth of chakra just to heal the village from the ground up two or three times over. That was what her second reserve seal was for. The third at the base of her neck was for combat chakra only. 

"No, Tsubaki-sensei."

Sakura nods sharply. 

"So is it a good idea for you to start taking hits for your teammates when you were the designated team medic for this combat scenario?"

Danzō winces underneath her, but grunts, "No, Tsubaki-sensei." 

Sakura looks up and catches a shock of red hair from the corner of her vision. It's Mito, and in her arms is Iori, wriggling and gurgling, bundled up in the red fox pelt he had given to them for her birthday present. Yuzuha is at home, in all likelihood, sniffling with fever and snoring on her nurse. 

Some of her guard is with her visibly, and the rest Sakura would feel if she only focused on it. She gives Mito a smile, and her wife nods at her, and slowly makes her way over to them. Mito had been very proud to introduce the concept of the Sharing Grounds to the newly minted Hidden Leave Village.

She often strolled through them as part of her duties as Senju Hashirama's wife, and also as the princess of Uzushio. She got to know nearly every shinobi that used the grounds to train, which was --literally-- all of them. She was very well-liked in the village, and everyone would stop their sparring to ask her for advice or to coo over Iori when she came out as well.

Mito brings her entourage towards them, and Sakura looks back at Torifu and Kagami. She clicks her tongue and the two of them come forward; Torifu places his staff in a casual position instead of a defensive one, and offers Kagami his arm for support. Kagami sags a bit gratefully into Torifu's hold, and the Akimichi boy runs a gentle diagnostic of Kagami's cracked rib. 

Sakura gets down to her knees to sit across from Danzō, and Kagami and Torifu huddle down beside them. She lifts her two hands to hold Danzō's single broken one, and with the ease of breathing, she begins to heal him. 

"You understand why being the designated medic for these drills is an important training method, Danzō-kun, I know that you do." 

He doesn't look at her, a touch too shamed to. He's a kid, and Sakura is a war hero, and he's fucked up doing something gallant for his crush in front of one of his closest friends. Sakura has been there before. 

"If you don't respect the integrity of the drill, then when you're in the field, you won't have any experience to rely on when you have to let your comrade take a hit that you could take better."

He had to do this right now. Because if the Second War happened, the village needed medics that were going to be able to focus instead of ones too emotionally attached to the comrades to do their jobs right. 

Sakura had cut Naruto's chest open and pumped his heart by hand. In that moment, she wasn't thinking about how much she loved him and how she wished she had taken the hit instead. All she thought about right then was buying enough time to save his goddamn life. 

She wants that to be a lesson these boys never have to know outside of a hospital. But she has to train them for the possibility that they will have to watch someone they love get the shit kicked out of them, and they will not be able to do anything about it until they're strong enough to disregard the rules. 

Tsunade had gotten there. Sakura had, too. She had no doubt all three of the boys could at least start the Byakguō. Torifu probably wouldn't because of his focus on his own clan jutsu, but Kagami would start, if only to help feed his Sharingan without emptying his reserves. 

"You have the potential," she says, "but you aren't ready for the Byakugō. You doing things like this shows me that you aren't."

"Kagami-kun could have taken that punch and rolled with it," Sakura continues, gently setting his thumb before she allows her chakra to heal it. She coaxes fragments of bone back into the right place. Sakura can heal a bone without a shred of trauma to the bone; it's soothing to her, like putting a puzzle together. "If he had taken his center of gravity lower to the ground, he could have freed himself, then made more space between us while he fell back to get help from you, and Torifu advanced until you can fight again."

She doesn't watch Danzō look up, face red with effort and sweat, at Kagami before he turns his gaze to the middle distance so he isn't looking at anything. 

"Do you not trust your teammates to take care of themselves in battle?"

"I do!" he insists, and Sakura is happy to hear him shout. It means he's been chastened, but he hasn't lost his spirit. 

"Then until you see they're in need for help, hang back, and do your goddamn job."

She says it as she heals the last of the shaken loose bones in his hand, and she holds it in a firm grip. He looks at her, his dark eyes surprised as they stare back into her one clear green one. 

"Because if you don't do your goddamn job, then everyone you're trying to protect dies by forfeit. Understand?"

He stares into her eye, and Sakura can feel that Danzō knows she knows what she's talking about. They've both seen war, both have had to grow up and live alongside it, but Sakura has the age, the scars, and the fame to show for it. Danzō hasn't even gotten his chin scar; turns out, they're a rite of passage within the clan. He'd get his first cut when he was sixteen, and the second to make a full 'x' when he was eighteen. 

"Yes, Tsubaki-sensei."

Sakura smiles at him because she believes him. Danzō's hotheaded, but he's not thickheaded. Tsunade would've let Sakura walk around with a broken hand for the rest of the day, but Sakura's softer than her sensei. She wanted to be. Tsunade had trained her to be ready for the day when she would face death for days at a time. 

Sakura wants to train Danzō face the world, unforgiving as it can be, and gentle as it often is. 

She'll let him sting with being embarrassed in front of his crush. She'll pop over to the Shimura estate in a few days time, though, to remind him of the lesson, and to beat it in with some good old fashioned, grueling personal training. 

Sakura was softer than Tsunade, but she knew how to make a lesson stick. 

"See to your teammates, boys," she says. "Next drill, Torifu-kun is the designated medic. Kagami-kun, Danzō-kun, you still have to try to get these out of my hair, one at a time."

She gestures broadly to the tama kanzashi in her hair, then rises and gives them a ten minute break to see to their wounds. She'll check over them before they begin the spar, but Sakura is confident in their abilities. 

Mito isn't very far away, just a respectable distance so she won't be able to hear what Sakura says to her team. Sakura waves to them, and Mito waves back. Iori sees Sakura approach, and the baby starts throwing her little fists in the air, happy to see her mother.

Mito lifts Iori a little higher onto her hip when Sakura arrives, and the little girl gurgles, pawing at her mother's bright red hair. Iori is all Senju in looks, her wispy curls of sandy brown hair wild over her head. Her eyes are are the bright green of the Uzushio sea. Sakura can see Tsunade now, in the shape of Iori's little eyes, and in the roundness of her cheeks, the soft line of her little chin.

Yuzuha on the other hand, has her mother's eyes, and red-violet hair that was wispy and soft against her skull. She's a bombastic baby, lots of kicking and noise making; absolutely the Uzumaki that she is by name. 

In a bright little way, Sakura had managed to extend Tsunade's family. Now she had an aunt in Yuzuha, and cousins, and eventually, she'd have Kushina, and then Naruto. The wide net that had been cast around the last remaining Uzumaki in Konoha had finally been knotted shut.

It made something settle in Sakura to know that Tsunade would have more people to introduce Dan to, to raise Shizune around; she had given Tsunade more people to love. Loving had always been Tsunade's greatest strength. She had a woman's heart. Sakura liked to think that this, even more than the hospital, and the legend of the Slug Princess she created that bore Tsunade's name, was the better gift. 

"Are you punishing those poor boys?" Mito asks, bussing Sakura on the cheek when she gets close enough. Rin and Utano are further back, and Momo is at Mito's hip today. Kikue was on baby-duty, and Usagi seemed to be the hidden guard. 

Sakura had never formally retired as Mito's Tsubaki handmaiden. The Uchiha elders didn't seem to have much of an issue with her having such an attachment to a goddess of fire, and it incensed the more petty Senju elders to see Sakura had such a long leash. She rarely even slept in her husband's bed. 

She was much too busy _guarding_ Mito's. 

"Only the one," Sakura grumbles. Iori reaches out her tiny hand and thumps it against Sakura's cheek. She turns her face and gums on her daughter's fist. "He deserved it." It comes out grumbled because of the baby fist in her mouth. 

"They say what you gave your sensei, your students give back to you."

Sakura rolls her eyes and lifts her head away from Iori. 

"I don't think I was the one my sensei was worried about losing to my ego." 

That absolutely would have been Sasuke, hands down. Naruto, they'd probably lose because he picked too big a fight. 

"Then it isn't ego," Mito says, reaching out one hand to tuck a pink lock of hair behind Sakura's ear. Her hair was long enough now to keep half of it pinned up with the betrothal pair of tama kanzashi Mito had given her for their own private ceremony. They were very simple, in a deep lacquered red, painted with bright yellow spider lillies, with a small set of golden bells dangling from the slightly shorter of the two ornaments. "It's the devotion to your teammates."

Sakura opens her mouth, then lets it click shut. Naruto would have been the one she marked down as 'devoted to a fault', but that was more 'devoted to a fault to Sasuke' than anything else. Sasuke was pretty much the same. 

But Sakura's initial crush on Sasuke, and her unrelenting sincerity of belief that she was in love with him had given her almost six years of her tearing hell up around the world until she and the others managed to find him. And when Sasuke wasn't in the front of her mind, then a brotherly love with Naruto wider and deeper than the chasm they cut into the Valley of the End was growing in her. 

Then the war ended in Kaguya ripping the world apart. Then it was only the three of them. They were both of her hands. She was both of theirs. Her commitment to that had been what kept her alive when she went back to Uzushio in the first place. 

"You hate it when I'm right," Mito says, smirking as she presses a kiss to Sakura's cheek.

"I couldn't," Sakura replies, slinging a loving arm around her wife's waist. "If I got upset every time you were right, I'd never be happy."

Mito laughs, and Sakura gives her side a little tickle as she escapes Sakura's grasp. 

"I have work to do," she says, and Sakura offers Iori a kiss on the palm before Mito and her guard finish their walk and return Mito to her offices in the Hokage Tower. "Be home on time."

"Yes, love," she replies, and with that Mito, their daughter, and her guard are gone. Sakura watches them leave, then turns her gaze to her boys. 

Torifu has a hand on Kagami's back as Kagami takes gentle shallow breaths to gauge how healing his ribs went. Kagami is focusing on his breathing while he carefully runs his fingers over Danzō's recently mangled-then-healed hand, brow furrowed as he gently uses his chakra to feel for bone shards shifting in Danzō's skin. He won't find any, because Sakura is good at what she does. 

She takes a second to watch them, her arms crossed at the waist, these kids that are suddenly her responsibility. When she was young, she had imagined Sasuke as her husband and an army of pink haired Sharingan wielding toddlers constantly coming in and out of the main house on the Uchiha estate. 

When she and Ino had settled together before the Fourth War, and there was still a future to look to, they had hesitantly floated the idea of sperm donors when they were in their thirties and off active duty. The dream went away when the world as they knew it did. 

Iori and Yuzuha were two gifts that Sakura hadn't expected. And then her team had fallen into her lap, and it was way more parental responsibility than she had planned to pick up when the war was assuredly over and the village was starting to coalesce into a home for the different people that inhabited it. 

These three talented teenagers are kind of like her test trial for when Iori gets big, and Yuzuha starts angsting at them from Uzushio when her grandparents take over her education. She's sure Kakashi never saw her as a warm-up to actual children, and Tsunade was past her thoughts of settling down by the time Sakura showed up. 

Still. She likes to see them like this. Each more concerned about the other than concerned about themselves. That was what she had been hoping to avoid after the war, starting up a village with a bunch of equally self-serving shinobi. 

But even this proto-generation was surprising her. It's a testament to how much she and Sasuke had changed. 

She gives them an extra two minutes before she calls time, and trots over to inspect their work. She lets her heart bubble over when all of them (even Danzō) perk up when she joins them again. 

That was one of the perks of having a team. She can understand why both her teachers did it, too.

**Author's Note:**

> she's full of love and she's gotta put it somewhere so i gave her some kids to teach
> 
> sakura training danzo is directly inspired by jaylene's amazing [and the crown it weighs heavy](https://archiveofourown.org/series/692811) verse right here on ao3, i highly recommend it, it's beautiful.


End file.
